WASHINGTON — As the Senate works to rewrite immigration policy, the House is spending floor time on legislation that won’t become law, with its 37th vote set for Thursday on repealing the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

On Friday, the House is set to consider a bill that would require the Securities and Exchange Commission to assess the costs of proposed regulations, which the White House said would be “burdensome and disruptive.” Last week, the House passed a measure to ensure U.S. bondholders would be paid if Congress can’t agree on a plan to raise the nation’s debt limit.

House Republican leaders are filling the calendar with legislation that won’t pass the Senate in part because they see a political payoff in future months, when they’ll need members’ support for tough votes such as raising the debt ceiling and passing annual government spending bills.

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“It’s a good strategy,” Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, said in an interview. “What we’ve learned with new members last session is that if we want to unite we have to lay a foundation.

“Our new members especially want us to go back to square one, what we stand for, what we believe in, what are we fighting for,” Brady said. “That all helps lead up to the tougher issues.”

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has sometimes had trouble holding his Republican caucus together since becoming speaker in January 2011. Uprisings by antitax tea party lawmakers doomed his effort to reach a budget deal with President Obama and brought the U.S. to the brink of a possible default before lawmakers agreed to raise the limit on Treasury borrowing.

Second-ranking House Democrat Steny Hoyer of Maryland criticized the Republican agenda this week as “all politics.”

“The Republicans are continuing to focus on political posturing and not positive policy,” Hoyer told reporters.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday held its third all-day meeting to make changes to an immigration plan proposed by a bipartisan group of eight senators. A bipartisan House group of eight members was at an impasse after negotiating on immigration for four years, Idaho Republican Raul Labrador, one of the negotiators, said Wednesday.

Thursday’s vote on repealing the health-care law will give new House Republicans a chance to go on the record against it and give them ammunition for the 2014 midterm election a year when the law’s main provisions will be implemented.

New House members and leaders of the Republican Study Committee, a group that promotes small government, have sought a vote on H.R. 45, to rescind the Affordable Care Act, for months.

“Within the RSC we have been pushing since the beginning of this year to have a clean vote on the repeal of Obamacare,” Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., who leads the study committee, said in an interview.

“We have a pretty significant number of new members who have never had an opportunity to, on the record, with their vote, express their disdain for Obamacare,” Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., said in an interview.

Obama’s health-care law, which seeks to extend insurance coverage to at least 30 million people, was passed by Congress with no Republican votes. Opponents say it will lead to higher taxes and insurance premiums and reduced delivery of health care. Before Thursday, the House voted 36 times to repeal or defund all or part of the law, according to Boehner’s office.

“This week we’ll be repealing Obamacare. Why? Because it’s going to raise the cost of health care, raise the cost of health insurance, reduce access to the American people, and continues to get in the way of employers hiring new workers,” Boehner told reporters Wednesday.

For Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, who often votes against his leaders, the repeal vote fulfills a promise made to get his vote earlier this year for a stopgap government-funding measure.

“It’s more than just a measure, a gesture,” Huelskamp said in an interview. “It is identifying what Republicans are for and what we are willing to do. We’re going to talk about the alternatives.”

A vote to rescind the health law will also help House Republicans push parts of their agenda. Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., last month had to cancel a vote on a bill to extend insurance coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. The measure didn’t have enough support from his party, partly because some members viewed it as going against their goal of repeal.

The Securities and Exchange Commission measure, which will be taken up tomorrow, addresses Republicans’ belief that the government is overreaching through expanding regulations.

“This bill would require the SEC to ensure that the benefits of any rulemaking outweigh the costs,” Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., said in a statement. It would require regulations to be “accessible, consistent, written in plain language and easy to understand,” he said.

The White House budget office, in a statement yesterday opposing H.R. 1062, said it would add requirements that would cause “unnecessary delays” in setting new rules and undermine the SEC’s ability to do its job.

On May 9, the House passed a bill to exempt federal payments to creditors from the U.S. debt limit, signaling the start of the latest debate over the nation’s borrowing authority. The bill, H.R. 807, is intended to insulate Republicans from criticism that they would let the U.S. default on its debt. It has almost no chance of advancing in the Democratic-led Senate and faces a veto threat from Obama.